Installation

Nothing is required other then the fact that you need a working USB 3.0 host, just pop in the drive, Windows 7 will initialize and detect the drive like so.

We'll take a trawl around our most popular SSD benchmarks. Please do not compare a USB portable drive to SSD results okay? It's a completely different thing with completely other usage. Small file transfers arent the kind of scenario youll regularly meet under real-world usage; by any standards.

Performance RW File Copy tests

In this round of benchmarks we start off with two new additions in our test suite, real-world file copy tests. Currently certain controllers benefit from compressed files, while others don't. Certain storage units hate small files, others work well with it. So it only makes sense to do some manual tests on that.

File copy write test - Slightly larger compressed files.

For this real-world file-copy test we take compressed data, like small JPG and MP3 files. We have them in random sizes from less than one KB up-to slightly larger 2MB files to emulate MP3 copying better (which most of you can relate to a notch better).

For this test, initially designed the stress the fastest SSDs we increased the workload here towards 3 GB with 4272 compressed files in total, with a maximum files-size of 2MB. So we drop a little over 4200 small files onto the the drive, copied from the RAMDISK and measure the amount in seconds it takes for the storage unit to deal with it.

Again, the files are being copied from the RAMDISK in the amount of seconds you see above towards the tested storage unit, lower is obviously better. The results where disappointing, and it has everything to do with the mix of small files within the array of files used for this test. Flash storage USB drives suck at these small files. This test is not what portable storage is about as these are all small files queued up to write. Let's take a more realistic approach.

If you go all manual on the file copies:

Here we copy roughly 3GB of MP3 and JEG files from the SH14 towards an SSD. The READ performance here is roughly 100 MB/sec. Reversed from a RAMDISK towards the SH14, it gets bad though.

Here we copy the same 3GB worth of relatively small files towards the storage unit. The write performance here is ~11 MB/sec. Pretty horrible really. So for copying lots of JPGs etc the performance is far from optimal.

Now after a format to NTSF we can copy large 1GB+ ISO files etc. Here we copy a 4GB sized image towards the storage unit. The write performance here is 140 MB/sec. That's really good.

ADATA SH14 portable USB 3.0 HDD reviewIt's time to review another USB 3.0 storage unit. It's originates from ADATA and is called the Superior (not a pun) SH14. We test the 750GB version of this model which should bring us read performance of 90 MB/sec. ADATA's latest looks quite fashionable. Buried under red is a 2.5-inch, 5400RPM drive that's IPX4 water-resistant and "military grade shockproof."